PLAGUE GROUND

Ted L. Brown clutches a limp, anesthetized house mouse firmly in one hand as he plunges a syringe into its tiny body to draw a blood sample-and he's having a hard time of it.

The needle has siphoned off only a minute crimson drop, probably not enough for laboratory testing.

"Packrats are easy to bleed," Brown remarks casually, getting ready to stick the mouse again. "They give you blood in no time at all. House mice are about the hardest ones."

An affable, twinkle-eyed biologist with sandy-colored hair, Brown came by this arcane bit of wisdom the hard way. He has spent nearly 20 years taking blood samples from mice and crawling on hands and knees around desert rodent burrows hunting for fleas.

Brown is a plague detective.

That's plague as in the disease that ravaged Europe and Asia during the 14th Century epidemic that became known as the Black Death.

Six hundred years later, people are surprised to learn that plague still exists. But the disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which lives in the guts of fleas, is endemic in the wild rodent populations throughout the Western U.S.

In New Mexico, the nation's plague capital, there have been 203 human cases, 29 of them fatal, since record keeping began in 1949.

Five people have contracted plague in New Mexico this year, one of whom died after delaying a visit to the hospital. The two most recent cases were reported last week. Health officials think at least three caught the disease from infected pets.

The mission of preventing human illness and death gives particular urgency to the work Brown and his partner of eight years, Pam Reynolds, perform as vector-control specialists for the state Environment Department. As scientific gumshoes, their job is to determine exactly how the disease has been transmitted.

Four or five days a week they pile into an old Dodge pickup outfitted with a camper shell, which they call the Plaguemobile, and head out to the countryside to check out confirmed plague cases or reports of mass rodent die-offs.

One day they might be flagging rodent burrows-sticking squares of white flannel down holes at the end of a plumber's snake hoping to collect some plague-carrying fleas-and the next they'll be setting rodent traps around the home of a person or pet who has the disease.

Brown and Reynolds constantly confront the risk of becoming infected with the killer microbe they're tracking. Each can tell stories of taking antibiotics to ward off possible infection after flea bites, but beyond wearing rubber gloves when they're sampling blood, they seem to take few precautions. They don't even wear bug repellent.

"We don't use it ourselves because we're trying to catch fleas," Brown explains.

Lately, though, they've been more careful when trapping rodents suspected of carrying hantavirus, the deadly agent that has killed at least 26 people in the Four Corners area of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona.

When called in by state and federal health officials for their rodent-trapping expertise, they wear double rubber gloves, respirators and hospital gowns while handling rodents.

But most of the time their job calls for them to confront the enemy face-to-face, so to speak. A favorite trick when snooping around a rodent burrow is to blow into the entrance, then sit back and wait a few seconds. If fleas are nearby, they'll obligingly hop toward the entrance, Brown says.

When plague-carrying fleas are found in a burrow, Brown and Reynolds may dust it with Pyraperm 455, a potent flea killer.

But the most effective form of prevention for people is education. Brown and Reynolds always urge people to avoid woodpiles, junked cars and other places that attract rodents.

A visit to Jaws

On a hot, sunny July morning, the two meet in their cluttered office in Santa Fe to discuss the day's work.

Brown has on jeans and a yellow T-shirt with the legend "Land of the Flea, Home of the Plague." Reynolds is dressed in jeans and a sleeveless turquoise T-shirt. They both wear sturdy Red Wing boots to protect them in their scrambles across rugged terrain.

They'll be visiting the home of Max Coll and Sally Rodgers, where one of the couple's eight dogs has tested positive for plague. They live in a hilly area southeast of Santa Fe known as Arroyo Hondo, where the sand- and rock-covered slopes are forested with large pinon and juniper trees whose nuts and berries attract packrats and ground squirrels.

Coll, a prominent state legislator, and Rodgers, an Arabian-horse breeder, have a large, two-story adobe house set back from the road. Their menagerie includes cats, ducks and geese, and a small pot-belled pig.

Rodgers comes out to meet the Plaguemobile as Reynolds pulls up the long dirt driveway. Brown and Reynolds split up to inspect the strings of live traps they laid around the property the day before.

The victim is a 7-year-old Doberman named Jaws, who several weeks earlier had turned up with what a veterinarian thought was an abscess under his jaw. It turned out to be a bubo, a swollen lymph gland caused by plague bacteria.

Rodgers says the vet ran a blood culture only at her insistence, because she'd once had a cat that was infected with a blood disease called tularemia.

"It came back and (Jaws) tested heavy-duty positive for plague," Rodgers says. The dog, who'd already been put on another drug, was switched to tetracycline, which is effective against plague if the disease is caught early enough.

"For a while I was pushing antibiotics down his throat without any precautions," says Rodgers, who now takes care to wear rubber gloves when she gives the dog his pills three times a day. She has been monitoring her own health to make sure she doesn't exhibit early signs of the disease.

`Thinking like a mouse'

Jaws, who's recovering nicely, is something of an anomaly. Although cats show clear plague symptoms, it's rare for dogs to get sick, even if they are infected, Brown says. Pets get the disease either by catching and eating infected rodents or by rooting around in a burrow where hungry fleas leap onto the warm-blooded newcomer.

Rodgers watches curiously as Brown starts collecting the crackerbox-shaped aluminum rodent traps he has set around one of her corrals. "He's like the Pied Piper of mice," she says.

Brown, meanwhile, is trying to remember where each of the 25 traps, which run about $14 apiece, have been set. Each box, containing a tasty snack of oats as bait, has a trap door that springs shut behind an inquisitive rodent.

How does he decide where to set each trap?

"As much as anything, it's intuition and thinking like a mouse," Brown says. He looks for likely sites near the wall of a building, such as a horse stall, under a pinon or alongside a fence.

Brown, 50, an Albuquerque native who attended the University of New Mexico, has a bachelor's degree in biology and a master's in herpetology. He got his start in the plague business courtesy of the Army, which sent him to Vietnam in the late 1960s to investigate outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Reynolds, a 37-year-old Midwesterner, has a degree in wildlife biology from Colorado State University. She joined Brown full time in vector control after working several years in another part of the Environment Department.

"I was aware of what Ted was doing, and I'd helped him sometimes with plague cases," she says.

Together, they're a walking, talking compendium on a disease that to many is still synonymous with doom.

Serious, but treatable

They'll tell you, for example, how plague first arrived in the New World in 1900 by way of San Francisco, carried there by ships from the Orient. Within a decade, the disease had jumped from the city's Norway rats into California's wild rodent population. It soon spread across Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, eventually appearing in West Texas.

The last big U.S. plague epidemic was in Los Angeles in 1924 and '25, when 40 people came down with the disease. Only two survived. But with the advent of antibiotics, plague has become a treatable disease, if still a serious one.

In humans, the onset of the disease usually is signaled by headaches, sudden high fever, nausea and muscle aches. If treatment is begun too late, it can kill from within a few days to a few weeks.

In the bubonic form of the disease, which comes from a flea bite, buboes form blackened, horribly painful abscesses that may split open. About half the victims die if left untreated.

If the infection reaches the lungs, the disease is known as pneumonic plague, which is more lethal than the bubonic form and can be spread from person to person. The man who died this year, a 68-year-old resident of a small village near Albuquerque, had pneumonic plague.

The number of cases varies widely from year to year, probably because of fluctuations in rodent populations.

In 1983, the record year for human plague cases in New Mexico, 26 people were diagnosed with the disease. This year's human fatality was the first among the 37 cases that have occurred since 1985.

Plague bacteria have been found in 33 of the 106 flea species in New Mexico, but it most often occurs in fleas that afflict field mice, kangaroo rats and colony-dwelling rodents, such as ground squirrels and prairie dogs. The mice are resistant to plague, so they act as a natural reservoir for the disease, passing it on through the fleas to more-susceptible squirrels and prairie dogs.

Brown and Reynolds meet up back at the Plaguemobile, where they find they have caught seven house mice. Reynolds unfolds the tailgate of the pickup to create an impromptu workbench and lays out the tools needed to draw blood samples.

Then she pulls one of the traps from a large plastic bag, spreads a smaller bag over its mouth and gives the trap a vigorous shake, expelling the mouse. She empties it into a large Mason jar whose gauze-covered inner lid has been impregnated with an ether-like gas that knocks out the rodent within seconds.

Not for the squeamish

She hands the jar to Brown, who places the inert creature into a white, enameled metal pan. He uses a toothbrush to carefully comb through the mouse's fur to see if he can dislodge any fleas. "Usually house mice don't have many fleas on them," he says.

Next he tries to draw blood, a process that usually kills the mouse. While Brown is having a hard time getting blood from his mice, Reynolds holds up a two-thirds-full syringe and teases, "Did I get enough, Ted?"

Any fleas they find are sent to a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratory in Ft. Collins, Colo. Scientists there grind up the insects and inject the flea puree into lab animals to see if they develop plague, a process that can take several weeks. Blood and tissue samples from dead or sick animals are analyzed at the state laboratory in Albuquerque, yielding a quicker result.

Brown and Reynolds repeat the process for all seven mice. The furry corpses are destined to become meals for some of Brown's personal collection of 42 snakes.

Reynolds, who has done this thousands of times, is unfazed by the carnage. "I just don't have a problem sacrificing a few mice for the public health," she says.

Their work done, they quickly stow their gear, ready for the 75-mile drive north to Taos, where another plague case awaits.

"It would've been nice to have a few different kinds of mice-a packrat or two, or maybe a squirrel," Reynolds says. It will be a while before lab tests tell them whether they have any plague carriers at this site.

With an entire state to cover, Brown and Reynolds have found no foolproof way to establish how or where a person or pet might have gotten the disease. They may miss a hidden burrow, or fail to lure the right rodent into one of their traps.

Often, they come up empty-handed.

"Sometimes," Brown concedes, "It's like looking for a needle in a haystack."